Authoritarian Absorption portrays the rebuilding of China's pandemic response system through its anti-HIV/AIDS battle from 1978 to 2018. Going beyond the conventional domestic focus, Yan Long analyzes the influence of foreign interventions which challenged the post-socialist state's inexperience with infectious diseases and pushed it towards professionalizing public health bureaucrats and embracing more liberal, globally aligned technocratic measures. This
transformation involved a mix of confrontation and collaboration among transnational organizations, the Chinese government, and grassroots movements, which turned epidemics into a battleground for enhancing the
state's domestic control and international status. Foreign interveners effectively mobilized China's AIDS movement and oriented activists towards knowledge-focused epistemic activities to propel the insertion of Western rules, knowledge, and practices into the socialist systems. Yet, Chinese bureaucrats played this game to their advantage by absorbing some AIDS activist subgroupsDLnotably those of urban HIV-negative gay menDLalong with their foreign-trained expertise and technical proficiency
into the state apparatus. This move allowed them to expand bodily surveillance while projecting a liberal façade for the international audience. Drawing on
longitudinal-ethnographic research, Long argues against a binary view of Western liberal interventions as either success or failure, highlighting instead the paradoxical outcomes of such efforts. On one hand, they can bolster public health institutions in an authoritarian context, a development pivotal to China's subsequent handling of COVID-19 and instrumental in advancing the rights of specific groups, such as urban gay men. On the other hand, these interventions may reinforce authoritarian
control and further marginalize certain populationsDLsuch as rural people living with HIV/AIDS and female sex workersDLwithin public health systems.
Industry Reviews
"Authoritarian Absorption tells the fascinating story of HIV/AIDS policy in China, where rural blood contamination victims were heartbreakingly sidelined and gay men were unexpectedly incorporated as state agencies developed capacities to control viruses - all under the influence of global networks of activists, experts, and funders. Deeply researched and brimming with theoretical insights, this book reveals the tangled threads connecting transnational
social movements and China's rising infrastructural powers." -- Tim Bartley, Professor in the Earth Commons Institute and Department of Sociology, Georgetown University
"Deftly sociological and quietly sympathetic, Long's multi-site, multi-year ethnographic study announces the arrival of an academic star. Her ingenuity and persistence show us how fieldwork research on contemporary China is still possible. The generative impact of international intervention on Chinese institutions, vividly illustrated by the stories of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, offers a hopeful lesson for our pessimistic age: the genetic make-up of communism is
not a foregone conclusion, and China is always a work in progress." -- Yang Su, Author of Deadly Decision in Beijing: Succession Politics, Protest Repression, and the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre
"Why would an autocratic regime with a peasant base and a homophobic history abandon farmers who contracted HIV/AIDS through the commercial blood trade and embrace gay men who fell ill in cities? How did urban homosexuals overtake impoverished peasants in China's hierarchy of HIV/AIDS victimhood? And what do the answers tell us about the interactions of local officials, western donors, international organizations, and health activists in the Global South? Yan
Long answers these questions in her painstaking study of the Chinese case, shedding new light on both epidemic politics and authoritarian survival in China and beyond. A book that's as empathetic as it
is insightful." -- Andrew Schrank, Olive C. Watson Professor of Sociology and International & Public Affairs
